Reading UpdateMario Lemieux: The Final Period by Mario Lemieux & Tom McMillan. Interesting, coffee table style autobiography of Le Magnifique that was heavy on the photos, light on text. I was perfectly ok with that. Of course, after this was published in 1997, Lemieux made another comeback, so this was actually not quite his final period.

Reading UpdateUnder the Skin (Ritual Crime Unit #1) by EE Richardson. Ok shortish paranormal thriller about a 50-something British detective inspector whose people are trying to track down someone misusing ritual magic to make shapeshifters. Throughout the story, I was distracted by the point of view character always being referred to by her last name, yet her coworkers were referred to by their first names. It was just enough for me to feel distanced from the story.Midnight Blue-Light Special (InCryptid #2) by Seanan McGuire. I only read a few chapters, then set it aside to come back to and never bothered.

Reading UpdateHounded (The Iron Druid Chronicles #1) by Kevin Hearne. Ok urban fantasy about Atticus O’Sullivan, a 2000 year old druid running an apothecary in Phoenix and hiding from an old enemy. I found Atticus to be kind of annoying, actually…Discount Armageddon (InCryptid #1) by Seanan McGuire. Ok paranormal romance about a cryptozoologist living in New York City, trying to launch a ballroom dancing career, prove to her West Coast family she can live on her own, and help out the city’s cryptid/monster population. This had a couple of particularly amusing bits (the mice!), but I didn’t quite gel with the narrator.

*sniff sniff sniff* “Your woolly wooliness pleases me, sock.” -Mayhem

Sock without Mayhem (although that’s Chaos’s head and foot coming in frame):

Reading UpdateFoxglove Summer (The Rivers of London #5) by Ben Aaronovitch. Good continuation of this urban fantasy series, which finds Peter and Beverly Brook looking for missing children in pastoral rural England. Not rated “very good” due to an abrupt ending and some inadequately resolved questions.

Reading UpdateDown on the Farm (The Laundry Files 2.1) by Charles Stross. Good paranormal short in which Bob is sent to the Laundry’s psychiatric in-patient facility to investigate a patient complaint.Equoid (The Laundry Files #2.9) by Charless Stross. Free online. Good paranormal horror short about Bob being sent forth to hunt for unicorns, which have rather more tentacles and carnivory than Bob (or the reader) expects. This won the Hugo for Best Novella this year.Overtime (The Laundry Files #3.5) by Charles Stross. Good short paranormal holiday story about Bob working overnight in the office on Christmas Eve. Of course he doesn’t have a quiet night.The Rhesus Chart (The Laundry Files #5) by Charles Stross. Good paranormal horror thriller in which computational demonologist Bob discovers what seems to be a nest of vampires, except everyone he works with is convinced that vampires can’t exist. While this didn’t end with a cliffhanger, it did end with me exclaiming, “Wait, what?!” and looking for additional pages…Halting State (Halting State #1) by Charles Stross. Weird but good scifi novel about a crime (or not) that may (or not) have occurred inside a virtual reality game. It’s told in second person (to give you the feel of playing a game, I think) from the alternating perspectives of three people who are trying to figure out what happened (or didn’t). Definitely took me a bit to get used to the unusual storytelling mode.Rule 34 (Halting State #2) by Charles Stross. Rule 34: “If it exists, there is p0rn of it. No exceptions.” Good scifi thriller about memes, spam, and life in the surveillance state, told in alternating second person (mostly) from three main points-of-view, although the POV number ratchets up toward the end. While there’s no POV character overlap with the first book, one of the main POV characters played a significant role in the first book. Again, it took me a while to get used to the storytelling mode, but once I did I was immersed.